암 환자를 대상으로 방사선 치료빈도가 높아짐에 따라 다양한 작용 기전을 바탕으로 한 방사선 방어제 개발에 많은 노력을 경주하고 있다. 본 연구에서는 조혈, 면역세포의 증식과 다양한 싸이토카인의 분비를 증가시킴으로써 방사선 방어효능이 보고된 바 있는 인삼 다당체를 대상으로 화학적 구성성분과 각종 면역활성 지표 및 방사선 방어효능을 확인하고 가장 상관관계가 좋은 인자를 추출해내고자 하였다. 면역학적 활성으로는 임파구 증식능, 대식세포의 산화질소 분비능, AK세포 활성능을 검사하였으며 방사선 방어효과는 endogenous colony-forming unit(e-CFU)로 측정하였다. 인삼으로부터 추출된 다당체의 구성성분 중 galactose함량이 증가할수록 면역증강작용이 우수하였으며 임파구 증식능이 방사선 방어효과와 밀접한 관계가 있는 것으로 나타났다.
According to the increase in the use of radiotherapy to cancer patients, many approaches have been tried to develop new agents for the protection of surrounding normal tissues. However, it is still few applied in the clinic as a radioprotector. We aim to find a representative parameter for radioprotection to easily predict the activity of in vivo experiment from the results of in vitro screening. The polysaccharide extracted from Panax ginseng was used in this study because the immunostimulator has been regarded as one of the radioprotective agent category and was already reported having a promising radioprotective activity through the increase of hematopoietic cells and the production of several cytokines. Mitogenic activity, AK cells activity and nitric oxide production were monitored for the in vitro immunological assay, and endogenous colony-forming unit (e-CFU) was measured as in vivo radioprotective parameter. The immunological activity was increased by the galactose contents of ginseng polysaccharide dependently. The result of this study suggests that mitogenic activity of splenocytes demonstrated a good correlation with in vivo radioprotective effect, and may be used as a representative parameter to screen the candidates for radioprotector.
